Metadata and the Repository
In the context of an institutional repository, metadata is needed to facilitate discovery of your repository content. Assigning relevant criteria to content items in the repository:
- helps users identify resources
- helps repository managers organise content
- brings similar resources together
- distinguishes similar resources
- gives location information
- is essential to facilitate harvesting of repository content by external systems
- supports archiving and preservation
Repository managers need to consider how they intend to gather or create metadata and what it will be used for:
Metadata creation
Metadata can be collected in many ways; these include:
- Added by the author during the submission process (through their user profiles and submission forms)
- Derived from the deposited content using automated tools
- Added or edited by the repository manager or a cataloguer
- Added by users of the content
The metadata that needs to be created manually by the repository manager or by a cataloguer is typically administrative and bibliographic information (such as a subject heading).
Metadata use
Once the metadata is collected, it must be reliably stored and is used to manage the resource (for example, it can be used to review the strength of a repositories collection in a particular domain or to check the currency of the file formats). Certain technical protocols or standards, such as OAI-PMH can be used to enable external services to access metadata records and facilitate resource discovery by a much broader audience.
It is important to consider these two contexts together. Strong communication between repository administrators and technical teams is needed to ensure the requested metadata input matches the requirements for the local management of the repository's items and enables the repository to be harvested for external use.
